The Program of General Education
Please note that these requirements pertain only to students who matricualted in Spring 2016 or earlier.
The College’s General Education program, required of all students, is aimed at fostering intellectual breadth, critical thinking, and acquisition of the fundamental skills and habits of mind conducive to lifelong inquiry, engaged citizenship and personal growth. Since 2005, first-year students have had the opportunity to enroll in first-year seminars designed to ensure close student-faculty relationships, intensive examination of a topic of deep substantive import, instruction in writing and critical reading and analysis, and active class discussion. A list of the first-year seminars offered in a given academic year is published annually and posted on the College website.
In addition, students are required to complete a series of at least seven courses designed to ensure broad engagement with the range of disciplines that constitute the liberal arts. These courses introduce students to the orienting questions, conceptual frameworks and methods of inquiry and expression of the natural and social sciences, humanities and arts. Lists of courses that satisfy the distribution requirement areas will be published annually and posted on the College website.
The seven General Education areas are:
Area 1: Physical and Biological Sciences
Area 2: Mathematics and Formal Reasoning
Area 3: Social Sciences
Area 4: Critical Studies in Literature and the Arts
Area 5: Creative Arts
Area 6: Philosophical and Religious Studies
Area 7: Historical Studies
Students must complete one course from each of these seven areas, taken in seven different departments (as defined by the course designations). Each of these courses, when completed at Connecticut College, must be taken for a letter grade and must be worth at least four credit hours. Any exceptions to the seven-department rule must be approved by the Committee on Academic Standing. These seven courses should normally be completed by the end of the sophomore year. With special permission, appropriate coursework taken at other institutions may be counted towards these requirements.